Overnight Pizza Dough

We have pizza night often in this house. My pizza stone is nice and seasoned from many years of use. I don't ever post about it because often we just have pepperoni and cheese. (That's what my people like.) But sometimes I like to go to the trouble of making our pizzas more individualized. I was thinking I'd like to find a pizza dough recipe that takes a couple days to make. So I set out to find one and came up with this from epicurious.com:

Overnight Pizza Dough
(makes enough for 8 9-inch pizzas)

Sponge:
1 cup lukewarm water (110°F to 115°F)
1 envelope active dry yeast, divided
1 cup all purpose flour, divided

Dough:
1 1/2 cups lukewarm (110°F to 115°F) water
2 teaspoons fine sea salt
1 envelope active dry yeast
6 cups (or more) all purpose flour
Olive oil
Yellow cornmeal
Sauces and toppings

Special equipment:
Pizza stone

For sponge: (I've included a very ugly picture of what my sponge looked like.)

Place 1 cup lukewarm water in large bowl of heavy-duty mixer. Sprinkle 1 teaspoon yeast (reserve remaining yeast for dough) and 1/4 teaspoon flour over water. Let stand until yeast dissolves and mixture looks spongy, about 4 minutes. Add remaining flour and whisk until smooth; scrape down sides of bowl. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let sponge rest at room temperature in draft-free area overnight (about 12 hours; sponge will look bubbly).

For dough:

Add 1 1/2 cups lukewarm water, 2 teaspoons salt, 1 envelope yeast, and reserved remaining yeast to sponge, then add 6 cups flour, 1 cup at a time, beating with dough hook to blend after each addition. Continue to beat until dough is smooth, comes cleanly away from sides of bowl, and is only slightly sticky to touch, scraping down bowl occasionally, about 5 minutes. If dough is very sticky, beat in more flour, 1/4 cupful at a time. Scrape dough onto floured surface; knead into smooth ball.

Brush inside of large bowl with oil. Add dough; turn to coat with oil. Cover bowl with plastic wrap; chill 6 hours, kneading dough down when doubled (after 2 hours).

About 1 1/2 hours before baking, dust 2 baking sheets with flour. Turn dough out onto floured surface. Knead gently; shape into 16-inch log. Cut into 8 equal pieces. Knead each piece into smooth ball. Arrange 4 balls of dough on each sheet. Cover loosely with kitchen towels and let rise until almost doubled, 1 to 11/4 hours.

If using pizza stone, place in oven.

Preheat oven to 500 F for 45 minutes. Working with 1 dough ball at a time, dust dough with flour. Press into 5-inch round, then gently stretch and roll out to 9-inch round.

If using pizza stone, sprinkle pizza peel or rimless baking sheet with cornmeal. If not using pizza stone, sprinkle large baking sheet with cornmeal. Place dough round on cornmeal; brush lightly with oil. Top as desired. Slide pizza onto stone or place pizza on baking sheet into oven.

Bake pizza until sauce is bubbling and crust is crisp and brown, lifting edge of pizza to check underside, about 14 minutes.

The end result was delicious. I'm not saying I'll never try a new pizza dough recipe, but I will definitely be making this again. We used about half the dough for these pizzas, and the next night I made calzones. The dough did not work out well for the calzones at all. Just FYI. It's been a while since I made these so I'll try and remember what the heck I put on each of these. I have been spending a small fortune on fresh mozzarella cheese- it makes SUCH a difference, though. It's totally worth it. The pizza on the far right has alfredo, ham, mushrooms, parmesan, fresh mozzarella, tomato, and basil. The pizza second to the left has mushrooms, basil, pepperoni, tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, and tomatoes. I really liked the texture of the crust- it was crisp but still chewy. I was expecting a better complexity with the flavor with the overnight method, but I still preferred the flavor over my usual pizza dough recipe.